I always forget how terrible I am at stealth games until a new Metal Gear comes along. I skipped MGS4 completely due to cutscenes totaling roughly 5 billion hours, but Ground Zeroes? Yeah, it's a demo that costs $30, but it's also pure gameplay in a large enemy camp/playground. If I can learn to stop hitting the wrong buttons to do the wrong things I might stand a chance at rising above utter suckiness and simply be merely bad at the game. The problem is that all my gamer instincts are those of the "bull in a china shop" variety, rather than a more appropriate "carefully assess the situation and strike with precision", so when I play this type of game I start out trying to do it right until I find myself in a tank, learning how far I can catapult a guard's body through the air by ramming it at full speed.

@InvincibleM: It's hard for me to really assess the difficulty of Dark Souls 2, since after completing two Souls games I've got a good grasp of how one needs to play the game. So I generally feel far more confident going forward than in either of the previous games.

It's still really tense and fun, and there are some really evil sections here and there. The game does feel like it's less opaque in some respects, and more opaque in others. But if you've gone through previous Souls games, you know how to play a Souls game.

So after I rang the bell I released Lautrec. A friend advised me that I would have to kill him early, so I attacked him in his cell. ...spent AGES trying to kill him and work it out. The finally decided I had enough and tried a cheap strategy. I did a bit of grinding to get 7000 souls, went to Oswald the Pardoner, get Absolution which calmed him down and made him happy with me again, then went to Firelink Shrine and kicked the fucker off the cliff. Suddenly all the frustration of trying to deal with this guy honourably took a back seat for lots of laughing.

... You actually sorta missed out on a cool sidequest by offing him early on. Granted, having played the Demon's Souls (which he's a deliberate callback to), what he did got me legitimately panicky when I couldn't find him afterwards. I was expecting him to KEEP doing that, see.

Man, the version of that guy in Demon's Souls is the cruelest thing in the game. He can screw you SO hard if you release him early in the game. Not so much with Lautrec, though, thankfully.

Maxed out a covenant in Dark Souls 2 because PVPing is fun and lagstabs, while they do happen (as well as lag-getting-slashed-to-bits-even-though-the-other-guy-is-ten-feet-away-and-facing-the-wrong-way), are far less common.

Made extra fun by the fact that it's the

rat covenant.

Said PVP area belonging to this covenant

has a nice blend of tricky passages full of giant rats that are on your side, minorly inconvenient traps you can set, and one large room in the beginning where it's basically a giant ring, making it impossible to get cornered. There were rats in that room too at first, but they removed'em with the latest update, making it possible to have straight-up duels if one wants (or if the opponent refuses to get lured into ratbite hell).Also, since YOU'RE pulling THEIR spirits into the area to fight'em, they get no real punishment for losing the fight... Other than any items they used. Makes'em far less sore about losing, I find :D

Now for some of my PVP fight strats, if anyone's curious. The following part details fight strategies in this PVP area I've mentioned:

So I'm a slightly tooled-up magic user with a bit of Dex on the side. Decently armored, but all my weapons are really light. Got a magic staff, a Falchion and that tasty fire-hand in my right slot, an okay-but-not-great shield in my left hand. Spells include the Homing variant on the magic missile (slow and not too strong but, well, homing), a much faster and more powerful magic missile, a shield powerup, and the pyromancy Toxic Mist.When people get drawn in, I stand on the other side of the big opening circle area, and wave at'em. They tend to dash over, and I greet'em with a puff of Toxic Mist, which obscures the entrance I'm in. Immediately following this, I run back up the stairs behind me to see what they do. If they don't power through the mist (which won't poison them if they move right through it) I've got time to apply a shield powerup.

Now if they hang back, they're clever. If they follow me, I've got'em where I want'em. Because then I let them push me back towards a noisy waterfall I triggered permanently. Behind this waterfall there are many rats.They follow me into the waterfall, I roll back out on the other side. Now they're in the waterfall, pinned between me and rats they can't see because of the waterfall, and they can't see what I'm doing, which is to toss my magic missiles at them while the rats keep them pinned and damage them.

If this fails, there are several other rooms with rats waiting to ambush them, and puddles of armor-destroying acid, (which'll also destroy my own armor, heh). My last fight against a heavily armored, Strength-based guy who wasn't terribly bothered by the rats had me running all over the place. He was running away to try to heal up when one of my last, slow-moving magic missiles JUST barely took him down. Hell of a fun fight.

And of course I ran into a few people who just wouldn't get lured into the rat traps, and were content to stay in the duel area. Nothing I could do to get rats down there, so I fought'em on their own terms. At that, the combination of slow-moving homing missiles and fast-moving straight-shot missiles as well as the threat of getting slashed worked pretty well, except to those who knew how to dodge both kinds. Some close fights there too.

Oculus being bought by Facebook has actually managed to put a bit of a damper on my day. Yes, I know that's pretty sad, but seeing something I was hugely excited for being tainted by a data-mining company is depressing.

Picked up Divekick on the cheap for the PS3/Vita. Okay, that's a fun game. But, man, the singleplayer mode. The bosses cheat. Literally cheat. They teleport right on top of you, to the point that you pretty much just need luck to pull through.Seems like a fun multiplayer game, though!

Divekick is absolutely rammed full of in-jokes for the fighting game community. Characters, backgrounds, the things people say... they're all references to things that'll go right over your head if you're not a regular watcher of fighting game tournaments on Twitch.